the best graduation speech i ever heard

The average American will live about 80 years. Granted, no graduating UCLA student will settle for average anything, but after all is said and done, most of our lives are more than a quarter over, and eighty is creeping ever closer, even as you read this. So, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Grad school? That's 1/15th-1/8th of your remaining time on Earth. A job? Hell, you can ride that straight to the grave.

If I've learned anything in my 6.25 percent of a lifetime here, its been to minimize the work and maximize the fun, and make the minimal amount of work I'm forced to complete as fun as possible (although writing the occasional six-page essay with a hangover and a half-erection from the previous night's festivities will always be painful).

These are the best days of our lives, we're told. Why wait until we're weak-kneed, hard-of-hearing and senile to enjoy their fruits?

"But the party's over now," you say. "No one will hire a liberal arts student, let alone an English student with a specialization in creative writing. You've been spent at an early age, you'll perish at the hands of a pointless education."

To which I reply: You are sooo wrong.

While all you "smart" kids with "real" degrees are busy dying your ways through law school and med school and teacher's credential programs, I will be serving the public something absolutely necessary for life to flourish: food. And from this artery of general consumption, I will siphon off more than my share of the life's blood, becoming fat in the process.

I will be the charming waiter with the offbeat hair, wowing your spouse with talk of my novel-in-progress and tickling your only-slightly underage children. I will be the reason your significant other asks if you've ever thought about writing or art or anything creative while you're up late reviewing medical journals instead of making love, and I will be the reason your kids grease their hair with pomade and experiment with sex and drugs. I will be the one your family is looking for when they sneak out of your house at night in search of the living.

I am a liver, unjaundiced by any of the toxins a credible degree will sap your life away with.

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